Não eu: Rosalind Krauss e as ironias de Jasper Johns

O texto propõe uma leitura dos dois escritos da crítica estadunidense Rosalind Krauss sobre a obra do pintor Jasper Johns. Para tal, parte-se das perspectivas antitéticas da autora sobre os quadros de Johns. De um lado, Krauss analisa alguns quadros sob a chave greenbergiana. De outro lado, a autora recupera a filiação duchampiana para investigar as táticas pictóricas de Johns. A indagação que surge daí é a seguinte: em que medida que este segundo eixo de análise é complementar ao primeiro? A resposta sugerida é encontrada no texto “Não Eu”, do dramaturgo – e um dos parceiros de Johns – Samuel Beckett.

Fractional Equity, Blockchain, and the Future of Creative Work

A core challenge in studying the real return on artist' work is the extreme difficulty accessing private records from when an artwork was first sold and thus relying on public auction data. In addition, artists do not typically receive proceeds after the initial sale. This paper, for the first time, uses archivally sourced primary market records to model returns on art and introduces a novel fractional equity structure for artists. We first model what would happen if the American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had retained 10% equity in their work when it was first sold. Second, we model a portfolio return using data from the Betty Parsons Gallery and the Green Gallery. To add a portfolio analysis to the performance of “star” artists, we model the galleries as a fund invested in all of artworks sold, using auction sales as the realization event. We find that the individual Johns and Rauschenberg works would have vastly outperformed equities markets. The gallery portfolio still substantially outperforms the S&P, even including 20% transaction costs. Beyond the art market, our larger conceptual framework for retained fractional equity has broad implications for compensation of early-stage creative work in any field and for potential applications of blockchain technology. This paper was accepted by Karl Diether, finance.

A carne das ideias

O artigo parte de um comentário a um dos trabalhos do pintor Jasper Johns dedicados ao tema da voz, Voice (1964-1967). Desse comentário extrai-se uma leitura cruzada com trabalhos de Robert Barry e Valère Novarina, que, a partir de uma região liminar da pintura, evidenciam esse campo artístico como lugar de sucessivas rearticulações ou de contínua produção de limiares e entrelaçamentos entre linguagem, corpo, espaço e pensamento.

Readymades

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.

Stella, Frank (1936--)

Frank Stella is a prominent American abstract artist whose deadpan aesthetic presaged Minimalism and Color Field painting. In contrast to the turbulent brushwork and improvisatory methods of Abstract Expressionism, Stella’s groundbreaking Black Paintings (1959) feature uniform surfaces and serial arrangements of forms. Born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella grounded his artistic education in non-objective painting. At the Phillips Academy, he studied with abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a pupil of Hans Hofmann. At Princeton University, he took studio courses with William Seitz, a scholar and practitioner of Abstract Expressionism; and Stephen Greene, an abstract painter and former student of Philip Guston. After graduating from college in 1958, Stella moved to New York City and produced gestural paintings of squares and stripes inspired by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns. He soon abandoned painterly textures but retained the stripe as his signature motif. Stella’s work of the 1960s continued in the vein of his Black Paintings, but evolved to include metallic and Day-Glo pigments and shaped canvases. After 1970, his paintings assumed sculptural dimensions and incorporated expressionist brushwork and exuberant arabesques. Stella has continued to develop his exploratory practice to the present day.

Johns, Jasper (1930– )

One of the most influential American artists of the late 20th century, Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and grew up in South Carolina. He studied at the University of South Carolina and attended art school in New York City for a short period. In 1958 Johns had his first solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery where he exhibited his encaustic paintings of simple objects and symbols such as Flag (1954–1955); it was at this show that the Museum of Modern Art acquired three of his works. Strengthened by his close friendship with Robert Rauschenberg, the composer and artist John Cage, and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Johns became a key forerunner of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s. In the 1970s Johns created virtually abstract paintings, focusing on painterly technique and leaving behind the depiction of everyday objects. During the 1980s his painterly and sculptural pieces made references to the work of other artists such as Edvard Munch. He has returned to the depiction of simple objects and symbols in his most recent works.